[wordup] Huge Dust Cloud Threatens Asia

[Adam Shand]

My boss has been telling me about this recently, but this is the first 
I've actually seen of it in print.

Adam.

Via: Brett Shand <brett at earthlight.co.nz>
From: http://www.commondreams.org/headlines03/0126-07.htm

Published on Sunday, January 26, 2003 by the lndependent/UK
'Ecological Meltdown': Huge Dust Cloud Threatens Asia
by Geoffrey Lean in Washington

Gigantic dust clouds swirling over China are threatening the world's 
most populous country with the first-ever "ecological meltdown", experts 
here warn.

The clouds - which stretch for thousands of miles over Asia and have 
even reached across the Pacific to North America - are rising from a 
rapidly growing dust bowl in northern China that far outstrips the 
notorious one in the United States in the 1930s.

It threatens to drive up the price of food and greatly increase 
starvation worldwide, and could lead to tens of millions of desperate 
Chinese environmental refugees.

"No country has ever faced a potential ecological catastrophe on the 
scale of the dust bowl now developing in China," says Lester Brown, 
president of the Earth Policy Institute, based in Washington. "Merely 
grasping its dimensions and consequences poses a serious analytical 
challenge."

Dust storms have been recorded in China for at least 2,700 years, but 
they are now increasing alarmingly both in size and in number. The 
Chinese Meteorological Agency says there were just five major storms in 
the country in the whole of the 1950s. This rose to 23 in the 1990s. But 
the first two years of this decade have almost equaled this figure 
already, with 20.

The storms - which peak in late winter and early spring - can blot out 
daylight in Beijing and other cities, make it hard for millions of 
people to breathe and destroy hundreds of thousands of acres of crops. 
They have closed schools and airports in South Korea and Japan, and 
caused a Korean car factory to shrink-wrap its vehicles as soon as they 
come off the production line to stop them being spoiled.

They have even occasionally crossed the Pacific: one in April 2001 
covered the west of North America from Canada to Arizona with dust.

The clouds sweep up millions of tons of precious topsoil from Chinese 
fields and pastures. Gone in a single day, the soil will take centuries 
to replace. But this is just the most dramatic symptom of the 
accelerating spread of deserts across the country, which is home to 
nearly one in every four people on the planet.

Between 1994 and 1999, the country's Environmental Protection Agency 
reports, the Gobi Desert expanded by 20,240 square miles, to within just 
150 miles of Beijing, New, smaller, areas of desert are erupting all 
over the country. In all, this "desertification" is affecting 40 per 
cent of the country's land. Partly as a result, harvests - which more 
than quadrupled between 1950 and 1998 - have fallen sharply, even as 
China's population and appetite grow.

In Ganzu province alone, some 4,000 villages are facing being submerged 
by drifting sands, and the Earth Policy Institute believes that 
throughout the country tens of millions of people may be forced off 
their land, dwarfing the migrations of the "Okies" from the American 
dust bowl.

The institute blames "over-cultivation, overgrazing, over-cutting and 
over-pumping" for the escalating catastrophe. Marginal land is being 
increasingly pressed into cultivation, but quickly turns to dust under 
the strain. The country's 290 million sheep and goats strip the 
vegetation off grazing lands. Cutting down forests removes the trees 
that bind soil to the ground. And excessive pumping of water from 
underground aquifers dramatically lowers water tables, drying out the earth.

China is belatedly trying to get to grips with the crisis. It is 
planting 26 million acres - a tenth of its grain-growing area - with 
trees. But many die because the soil is already too thin; and, say 
critics, too many are being planted around Beijing so as to try to 
"green" the city - and clean the air - before the 2008 Olympics.

As the crisis continues, Mr Brown predicts, the world will soon feel the 
pinch. So far China has compensated for its falling harvests by eating 
stocks, but soon it will have to buy massive amounts of grain on world 
markets. He warns: "Grain prices could double - impoverishing more 
people in a shorter period of time than any event in history. It would 
create a world food economy dominated by scarcity rather than by 
surpluses, as has been the case over most of the last half a century."

2003 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd